Is it Possible to Write Off-Topic Blog Posts as a Musician?

This question was posed to me by a friend of mine, and if you plan to make blogging a part of your online marketing efforts, I think it is an important one to consider.

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The Evolution of Blogging

Blogging has changed a lot over the years, and a lot of people are using it differently than they were in the past.

One of the most useful aspects of a blog is that it automates the content creation process. In other words, you can simply write the content and publish it, without having to go in to your site’s HTML to manually insert every post. This has made content creation a much more efficient process than ever before.

Moreover, what this means is that there are a variety of ways of approaching the art of blogging. If you want to make sure that you are staying “on-topic”, you should really take some time to think about what your goals are.

What Are Your Goals?

What do you hope to accomplish with your blogging efforts?

In the past, many people used their blog to share the latest news and happenings in their lives or businesses. These days, unless these posts are particularly interesting, people tend to skip over them. They’re too self-interested. Today, more people are using their blogs to share ideas, share interesting findings, provide information, and promote their works.

Though many people have built a product around a blog, your job as a musician is to build a blog around a product. This mindset will help you to make blogging work for you.

The Different Styles of Blogging

You’ve probably heard of content marketing before. This is the practice of strategically creating content that will attract your target audience to your website. In the long run, it is an effective way of increasing search traffic to your site.

Some people simply share novelty content from across the web. They find a funny picture or interesting video and add their commentary to it. You’ll see a lot of people taking this approach on Tumblr.

No strategy is right or wrong. It really just depends on what you want to accomplish.

Here are a few goals that you might consider important. What you blog about will largely depend on which of these objectives resonates with you.

Communicating with your fans: as a musician, it serves to reason that communicating with your fans should be a high priority. However, if that’s all you intend to do, a simple news log would suffice; there isn’t really a need for a blog. You can just as easily communicate with social media or emails.

Increasing traffic to your website: if you want to increase search traffic to your website, you will want to provide useful information on a regular basis and talk about trends in your industry. You might review products or create how-to guides. It’s more time-consuming to create content this way, but the end result is that you will continue to attract more visitors over the long term.

Sharing interesting things that you find: this tactic more or less goes hand in hand with increasing traffic. Where content marketing has a long-term strategy in mind, sharing novelty items is simply about boosting your traffic in the immediate. It shouldn’t be considered a long-term strategy, which means that you will have to post often.

This isn’t to say that you can’t implement a variety of strategies all at the same time. You could even say that every goal correlates; it’s just a matter of figuring out your work ethic and commitment level.

Additionally, you might have other goals that you would consider important. You might want to build your personal authority on a subject and write and sell books or e-books. You might want to monetize your blog with ads and affiliate programs. Whatever the case, your writing should compliment and support your overarching career goals.

How to Avoid Off-Topic Blog Posts

If you’ve had some time to think about your goals, you should be able to define what would be considered off-topic for yourself, based on your strategy.

For example, if you’ve decided to take the content marketing route, you might not want to clutter up your blog with “hey we’re on tour” type posts.

If you’ve chosen to post novelty items, you may not want to mix them in with how-to guides and top 10 lists as they might get lost in the flurry of updates. You’ll probably want to post as often as you can, too.

Again, a mixed approach can work too, but you should be aware of it when you’re doing it. That way, you’ll never go “off-topic”, in a manner of speaking.

David Andrew Wiebe has built an extensive career in songwriting, live performance, recording, session playing, production work, investing, and music instruction. In addition to helping musicians unlock their full potential, he also continues to maintain a performance schedule with Long Jon Lev and Adrenalize. If you'd like to be notified whenever the blog is updated, click here to subscribe.